Manali Missives 9/2014 An Indian Journey through Lent, Day 7

An Indian Journey through Lent, Day 7

Lent is a time for engaging in spiritual discipline. My main discipline of any sort at the moment, however, is to learn how to communicate in Hindi. Hindi, (spelt almost as िहनदी - praise to the one who reports the mistake!) or more precisely, “Modern Standard Hindi”, is a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language native to people living in the Union territory of Delhi and the northern states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Kharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and parts of Rajasthan. It occupies a peculiar position, being at once one of the official languages of India, fiercely resisted by the native speakers of several other languages, particularly in the south of the country, and virtually identical with Urdu.

Here, I think, lies the clue to the conundrum. Urdu is associated with the north Indian Muslim community, biological and/or religious descendants of the invaders and rulers of much of the sub-continent. Its speakers draw its script, and its literary and specialised vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, whence it came. Hindi draws instead from Sanskrit, India’s ancient and priestly language. This provides a hint at the terrible, centuries long struggle between waves of Islamic invaders and the mainly Hindu natives of India, some 80 million of whom, according to some estimates, perished violently.

That said, in their colloquial, spoken forms the two varieties are nearly indistinguishable. As a speaker of Angrezi (अंगेज़ी - again, spot the mistake!) I represent another invader. Unless I speak at least functional Hindi I and what I am trying to do will never be fully accepted. So here I am again, aged 58, having a go at my 14th language. I have to say that it gets harder with the passing years! I’ve engaged a tutor who is younger than my children, and who in finest Indian pedagogical tradition does not withhold his criticism on those frequent occasions when I make a mistake. (Apart from that we get on fine, but I have ground my teeth in frustration on many occasions!) Just learning the Devanagari script was extremely draining. I’m so glad that Lena spoke Hindi as a child in Madhya Pradesh; though she, too, finds communicating with patients, many of whom speak the local language Pohari, very difficult too, it’s enabled her to get straight to work as a doctor. Her father, by contrast, studied Hindi full-time for 2 years during the 1950s at a specialist language school before he did anything else. How times have changed!

One of our Lenten disciplines is to sit together early in the morning and read our Bibles in Hindi.